Use Communication Compliance reports

  • 7 minutes

Communication compliance reports show how your policies are performing across Microsoft 365 communication channels. You can use reports to track message activity, review trends over time, and export message details for more targeted analysis or archiving. If you manage communication compliance or lead message reviews, reports highlight trends and help you prioritize actions.

Use the Reports dashboard

To get started, go to the Reports tab in the Communication Compliance solution in the Microsoft Purview portal. This dashboard gives you a quick overview of policy matches, review activity, and escalation trends.

To view and manage reports, users must be assigned to the Communication Compliance Viewers role group.

The dashboard includes visual report widgets that highlight common trends, such as:

  • Recent policy matches

  • Resolved items by policy

  • Policies with most matches

  • Users with the most matches

  • Escalations by policy

    Screenshot showing the reports dashboard in Communication Compliance.

The widgets offer a quick snapshot of policy activity but aren't designed for export. For deeper analysis, use the detailed reports, which support filtering and .CSV export (up to 3 MB).

Screenshot the detailed reports in Communication Compliance.

Review detailed report types

The dashboard includes several detailed reports to help you analyze communication compliance data across different dimensions. Here's what you can review and export:

  • Policy settings and status: Shows configuration details for each policy, including location scope, reviewer assignments, review percentages, and the last time the policy was modified.
  • Items and actions per policy: Breaks down how messages were handled for each policy—pending, resolved, escalated, tagged, notified, or added to a case.
  • Items and actions per location: Groups the same data by Microsoft 365 service like Exchange, Teams, Viva Engage, or non-Microsoft sources.
  • Activity by user: Summarizes policy matches and actions taken per user.
  • Sensitive information type per location (preview): Highlights the sensitive information types detected in each location, including Microsoft 365 Copilot interactions.
  • Email blast senders: Lists high-volume senders that were filtered out to reduce noise.

Tip

The date filters for reports use Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). You might want to account for time zone differences when reviewing results.

Create a message details report

When you need more specific insights, you can create a message-level report for any policy. These reports are helpful for reviewing individual messages flagged by a policy over a set time period or on a recurring schedule.

To create a report:

  1. Go to the Policies tab.

  2. Select a policy, then choose Export report.

  3. Choose to include all users or select specific senders.

  4. Set a one-time or recurring schedule.

  5. Reviewers receive an email when the report is ready to download.

    Screenshot showing how to create a weekly report from an export in Communication Compliance.

Each report includes message-level details like sender, location, tags, classifier matches, and resolution notes. You can schedule up to five recurring exports per policy.

Note

Message-level audit and activity reports reflect only items matched within the selected date range. If the report is empty, there were no matches for the selected timeframe.

Export audit data for policy and review activity

Communication compliance also supports audit exports, which help you track when policies were changed or when messages were reviewed.

You can export:

  • Policy update history: Captures create, edit, and delete actions for a policy.
  • Review activity history: Logs user actions during the review process, including tagging, escalation, and resolution.

These exports are available as downloadable .CSV files from the Overview or Policy pages. You must be a Global Admin or a member of the Communication Compliance Admins role group to export audit data.

If your organization has enabled auditing, these actions are also captured in the unified audit log and can be queried using PowerShell.

Search-UnifiedAuditLog -StartDate $startDate -EndDate $endDate -Operations SupervisionPolicyCreated,SupervisionPolicyUpdated

Monitor mailbox storage for policy matches

Each communication compliance policy stores matches in a dedicated scoped mailbox. If this mailbox reaches 100 GB or 1 million messages, new matches won't be captured. To avoid this, regularly check mailbox size and message count using PowerShell:

ForEach ($p in Get-SupervisoryReviewPolicyV2 | Sort-Object Name) {
   "<Policy name>: " + $p.Name
   Get-MailboxStatistics $p.ReviewMailbox | ft ItemCount,TotalItemSize
}

If the mailbox reaches its limit, create a new policy with the same configuration to continue capturing matches.